Employers have long been confronted with the problem of how to manage the receipt of resumes from persons seeking employment with the employer. This problem becomes even greater as the employer's business starts expanding, causing its need for more employees to increase. Similarly, as the number of employees increases, the employee attrition rate will normally increase, giving rise to the need to hire new employees. Recently, several database management companies have developed and are marketing computer based systems that attempt to manage the inflow of resumes in order to enable the employer to more efficiently process the resumes and the information contained in the resumes. These resume database managers typically create extensive databases for an employer that are used to organize the resume information or content into various categories, which may be related to employment positions which need to be filled, or may be archived so that the applicant's resume information can be retrieved at some later time when the need arises.
Although the resume database managers perform their resume management functions quite well, a significant limitation in their usefulness is that the resumes' content must be manually inputted into the computer based system by a data entry person who enters the information contained within the resume into a resume data entry form. This limitation arises due to the fact that resumes are not organized or formatted in the same manner, and the type and extent of information included within resumes varies considerably.
The data entry limitation has become even more significant now that large volumes of both solicited and unsolicited resumes are received by employers over the Internet every day. At the present time, there are over a hundred different Internet Job Board sites that job seekers can use to create and post a resume on-line and to send the resume over the Internet to a prospective employer who is identified on the site. Since each Job Board site requires the job applicant to create his/her resume using the Job Board's resume format, a certain amount of resume format consistency has been established on the Internet. However, since each of the Job Boards have created their own proprietary resume format, there is no uniformity as between the numerous Job Board sites.
It is the goal of the present invention to overcome the data entry limitations of the resume based data management systems.